Biting fire ants can move a bare-footed person or bare-handed gardner to suddenly dance, utter profanities, and generally run around like a beheaded chicken while doing so. The modern, temporary, exotic-invasive-induced version of ergotism.

One chilly spring morning I was hacking through some rose bushes in order to get cages around the peonies--it was that magic moment after the peonies had started to bud but before they knocked themselves over with their blossoms. The ants had been working away at the wax on the buds for days, but that morning my little helpers were barely moving. I wondered whether they were affected by the cold, so I got very close and just started to talk to them--asking how things were going, saying hello. My warm breath seemed to be enough to speed the ants up until they marched away and got cold again. I figured the sun would eventually free them--they reminded me of the fairy-tale servants who were unlucky enough to have been in the castle when Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger.

A friend of mine lived for a couple of years in the Marshall Islands. He and his friend would create a tiny sugar mountain in their dwelling, and then wager on how long it would take the ants to haul away all the sugar. Things contemplated and done on extended island time might baffle some of us.

"After the Indian camp has broken up and moved away, many Indian beads can usually be found on the outside of the anthills." Ants Ornamenting Their Homes, St. Nicholas: a Monthly Magazine for Boys and Girls, Volume 27, Part 1, p. 549, 1900.

Regarding the fossil evidence of dinosaur-age mammals found in anthills: "It has been found that in addition to ordinary sand-grains certain of the anthills also contain fossils, tiny teeth, bone fragments, and in rare instances perfect bones that the ants had unconsciously collected and have been the source of much of our knowledge of smaller forms which were contemporaneous with the larger reptiles." - Popular Science Monthly, September, 1915, p. 241.

I once monitored a colony of fire ants in Florida while they buried a dead mole that they could not move, by systematically excavating grains of sand and soil beneath it and depositing these over it. The mole slowly sunk into the ground and disappeared. I didn't return to excavate and ascertain the condition of the bones or teeth, or to see if they survived.